Marketing and creative industry have moral obligation to optimism

Marketers and ad agencies have a moral and financial responsibility to shine optimism on the economy and “bring joy” to consumers, according to leading agency boss Robert Senior.

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Speaking at the Guardian Changing Advertising Summit yesterday, (20 October), Robert Senior, CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi EMEA and Saatchi & Saatchi Fallon Group, closed the conference with his remarks about the duty of the marketing and creative industry’s responsibility to optimism as an antidote to the gloomy economy.

He said: “The news agenda is feeding us misery. Marketing communities, on whatever platform, it’s our moral obligation and fiscal obligation to put things though the prism of optimism to bring a little bit of joy.”

Speaking on a panel about how creativity combined with technology will drive the future agency model, Senior said at the role of the agency has always been changing, but fundamentally, agencies are still doing the same thing albeit with a different mindset.

“We have to be able to develop and create ideas at the speed of which our consumers are consuming them and that isn’t going to change. The beginning and end of the journey is data, but if you don’t have a good idea, you can have all the data you want but it’s no good. I’m in the ideas business, the point is what you put on the platforms, not the platform itself.”

Also on the panel, Mark Read, director of strategy at WPP and CEO of WPP Digital, says that new technologies will not erode traditional creativity in advertising.

“If you get traditionally creative people really engaged in technology, that’s where you get really good ideas. Idea driven marketing doesn’t go away just because of the technology,” he says.

His comments were echoed by Coca Cola’s vice president of global advertising strategy and excellence, Jonathan Mildenhall, who said: “Technology is a brilliant creativity enabler but you cannot disengage technology from the ideas themselves. It’s essential to integrate technologies into our core creative teams.”

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